Be a Professional : Dress for Success

Corporate dressing helps you develop a magnetic personality which attracts other individuals. You need to have that charisma and dressing formally helps you in the same. Corporate dressing helps you create that first impression. Remember, first impressions are important and they help you throughout your life. If you fail to impress someone in the first meeting, you will never get a second chance.

The importance of a dressing for professionalism varies somewhat by industry. However, the correlation between the two is generally strong. Appearance ranked second only to communication skills when respondents named qualities most often associated with professionalism, according to a 2010 national poll conducted by the Center for Professional Excellence at York College of Pennsylvania.

The professional sense of dressing as a step by step learning and it takes time to develop a business sense so it makes sense to start it when you are perusing your professional courses. so that once you start the professional journey you are already ready to excel.

Matthew Randall, executive director of the CPE, said, "How an individual dresses for work can be a powerful extension of his personal brand. Clothes, accessories and even the footwear an employee chooses to wear help to reinforce or diminish his skills and qualities in the eyes of his employer, co-workers and clients."

The "Dress Code" Debate

Business attire has changed significantly over the years, especially in the last 20 years. Too many people have forgotten why proper business attire is important.

Some Institutions/companies prefer to allow and even encourage students or employees to dress freely or casually for comfort. This tends to work well in more creative work environments.

However, others will typically encourage and/or require a more defined and professional dress code to maintain a professional image of themselves and the business, where employees routinely interact on a daily basis with prospects, clients and business partners or students who are going to be a future business leaders and interact with them.

Conflicts arise when people prefer to dress comfortably or in the most recent styles rather than realize the importance for them to present themselves in a more professional or conservative manner. The major reason why dressing in proper business attire is important for every business professional is because it presents a visual image and sends a message that the people are professional.

How to choose a suitable business Attire

Although a one-size-fits-all or universal dress code may not be achievable or realistic, some universal guidelines are possible and could include the following:

Modest:

It is most important to get attention for great work rather than gaining attention for wearing the latest fashion fad or in appropriate leisure wear or sportswear found outside the office at a sports event, party or beach.

Comfortable: 

Wearing ill-fitting clothes – whether too tight or too loose or unsuitable for your body type – should always be avoided. If you are uncomfortable, it will make your work day truly awful. Find something that fits the outer and inner you. This applies to the fit of your attire and the comfort of the shoes you wear. Comfort needs to trump fashion in the choices made.

Outline Appropriateness:

You may have one Student or employee showing up in short gym shorts and another girl showing up in a dress that looks more appropriate for a Friday night out on the town, so in this case an appropriate dress should be chosen, which can serve to outline appropriateness.

Be mindful that basic etiquette must accompany appropriate attire. Appropriate attire must be combined with basic business and professional etiquette. The two are intertwined and integrated when presenting a professional image of yourself and your company. First impressions and overall judgments about people are formed by the way they dress. Since the way someone dresses affects the perception of a company's customers or business partners, it is important to maintain a standard of dress that creates a positive impression.

Why We Procrastinate When We Have Long Deadlines

“Can you get that to me by the end of the day?” isn’t a request many employees like to hear. But for many people, having shorter deadlines instead of longer ones — “Do you think you can do that by the end of the week?” — might actually help them complete a task and see their work as being less difficult.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Rajesh Bagchi and Stefan Hock and I demonstrate that longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting. This is true even when the deadline length is incidental, such as when a venue or guest isn’t available for an extended period of time.In our research we asked volunteers at a local community center to answer a short survey about retirement planning. We set two incidental deadlines. In one group, the online survey could be accessed throughout the next seven days, but the other group had 14 days. Results showed that participants who faced the longer deadline wrote longer responses to the survey and spent more time on it. But there was a catch: Those same participants were more likely to procrastinate and were less likely to complete the assignment than their time-constrained counterparts.

Source: HBR 29 Aug, 2018

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When Is Teamwork Really Necessary?

Most leaders assume that they need to foster teamwork among the people whom directly and indirectly report to them. Teaming is now seen as the workplace equivalent of motherhood and apple pie — invariably good. The problem is when leaders try to drive the wrong kind of collaboration on their particular teams. The result: wasted time and unnecessary frustration.Consider the example of Nicolas, a regional sales vice president at a medical devices company. When promoted to his new role, he inherited a group of district sales managers responsible for selling to hospital systems in their respective geographies. Although his one-on-one meetings with these reports, which involved progress reviews, motivation, and coaching, were highly productive, his monthly team meetings weren’t. While the group liked getting together and engaging in some joint activities — such as goal setting, best-practice sharing, and talent development — people often wondered why they were in the room.Catherine, a senior marketing director leading a cross-functional product development team at the same company, provides a contrasting case study. Although she sometimes needed to work with team members individually, most productive work happened in weekly meetings, to which she brought focused agendas and effectively facilitated discussions about key issues. The participants rarely felt they were wasting their time.

Source: HBR 16 August, 2018

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Employee Engagement : Work Less and be more productive

How many hours do you work every week? The standard in India, if you're working for eight hours every day for five days, is 40 hours. And yet, there are countries where people work for lesser hours and produce more. There are various types of arrangements companies and various countries are providing which facilitates the employee to work lessor hours and be more productive.

 Lets look at some of concepts, which have been adopted

Four-day week
A Four-day week is an arrangement where a workplace or school has its employees or students work or attend school over the course of four days rather than the more customary five. This arrangement can be a part of flexible working hours, and is sometimes used to cut costs, as seen in the example of the so-called "4/10 work week," where employees work a normal 40 hours across four days, i.e. a "four-ten" week. Denmark was first in europe to provide this facility. Utah State in United State had Four-day week system from 2008 to 2011. Four days work week is also introduced in Gambia for public officials. In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian announced in February 2018 that it would begin trialing a four-day work week in March 2018.

35-hour working week
The 35-hour working week is a measure adopted first in France, in February 2000. This is done to take advantage of improvements in productivity of modern society to give workers some more personal time to enhance quality of life. Germany, Switzerland and Ireland are among 35 hours working countries.

Shining Mondays 
The Japanese government is mulling over plans to give Monday mornings off to its workers to fight overwork. The government plans to enact “Shining Monday” – where once a month, workers will get to have a lie-in on Monday morning, and only clock in after lunch.

The economy, trade and industry ministry believes that “Shining Mondays”, part of a wider campaign to address the punishingly long hours many Japanese work, will give employees a much-needed lie-in at the start of the working week. The move comes as the country has been plagued by the rampant occurence of “karoshi” (death by overworking) over the last few years. The move aims to improve the country’s poor record on work-life balance.

Norway's employees work the least, and are still the most productive
The people of Norway are expected to work for only 27 hours every week--one of the shortest in the world--and still they have ranked as the second most productive country in the world by a survey. Add to this mix the report of another study which claims that the Norwegians form the happiest workforce in Europe, and you'll be more surprised than ever.

Despite Norwegian workers enjoying one of the shortest workweeks at 27 hours, they still manage to yield a productivity sum of 39.72 GBP (337 kroner) per person for every hour worked, and the output per person has grown by nine percent over the past year.

Denmark's labor laws : "Flexicurity"
Denmark's labor laws are based on a concept called "flexicurity" - a unique model in which it's easy for employers to either hire or fire workers, but workers are also protected by a generous government safety net. Unemployment benefits can last up to two years.

Danish workers average 33 hours a week and have a right to at least five weeks of paid vacation each year. The work culture in Denmark is similar to that in the rest of Scandinavia. Flexible work schedules are common and paid vacation time is ample. When the OECD ranked nations based on work-life balance last year, Denmark came out on top.